seeing a bigger picture – the addiction of travel

It is said, that with any ‘problem/issue’ we are looking at, it is important to see it both from high up – a sort of helicopter view, and at close quarters. I get my helicopter view from getting out there and exploring a bigger world through travel. As a parent it was always very important to me that my children were also exposed to as much foreign travel as we could afford. Around the time the Berlin wall came down, we did a lot of Eastern European coach tours which were very cheap. Imagine what people thought when we showed up with three children under 5? They were brilliant travellers always. J1 especially would get under the seats and sleep all night till we got there.

As a younger woman I loved the sun. I still love the sun, but I like the experience of always being on the move even more. The first time I experienced this sensation as a life-changing moment was on a group trip to Thailand. We had spent most of the day falling around in mud in what they describe as a jungle trek, but I would describe as a walk through a muddy forest with biting insects. We had got to the middle of nowhere, to some village with houses on stilts and had been given this amazing fried chicken and cold beer. We ended up lying down to sleep en masse on the floor under a shared mosquito net with the rain drumming down on the roof. It doesn’t sound like much when I write it down, but my heart was just singing. We were having the most amazing time, about to go on an elephant ride the next day and I remember thinking, ‘this is what I love’. Of course I realise no indigenous people get to eat as much chicken as we had been given or have interest in beer. That was a sop to our western standards, but the experience of being on the move in such a way enchants me. No doubt this was a pre-cursor to VSO.

So every year, so long as I have money, I travel. This year I went to South India with Intrepid. I would recommend them. I also like being in a group. I don’t care if they are not the sort of people I would ever have as friends; I just find the dimension of travelling with others enriching. So there were 11 in the group made up of people from the UK, Australia and New Zealand aged between 18-64. I like the budget option because you travel on local transport, tend to stay in locally run accommodation and I can afford it. You experience a range of different locations – the hippy beach at Varkala, the wonderful old Portuguese colonial town of Fort Cochin, full of reclamation shops (interior designers eat your hearts out), the forest at Periyar and extraordinary boulder strewn landscape at the world heritage site of Hampi (very popular with Israelis). There was an NZ radio presenter

www.roxboroghreport.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/south-india-mayhem-my-top-50-photos.html

who was being subbed to write a travel log. Check out his awesome photos. They are just extraordinary and capture the atmosphere of the places we visited beautifully. I went with Team Tim twice to swim in 5* deserted colonial hotel pools. These are the moments of magic that I return to when I am sad about something and need to be uplifted.